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Abstract Structural components such as printed circuit boards (PCBs) are critical in the thermomechanical reliability assessment of electronic packages. Previous studies have shown that geometric parameters such as thickness and mechanical properties like elastic modulus of PCBs have direct influence on the reliability of electronic packages. Elastic material properties of PCBs are commonly characterized using equipment such as tensile testers and used in computational studies. However, in certain applications viscoelastic material properties are important. Viscoelastic influence on materials is evident when one exceeds the glass transition temperature of materials. Operating conditions or manufacturing conditions such as lamination and soldering may expose components to temperatures that exceed the glass transition temperatures. Knowing the viscoelastic behavior of the different components of electronic packages is important in order to perform accurate reliability assessment and design components such as printed circuit boards (PCBs) that will remain dimensionally stable after the manufacturing process. Previous researchers have used creep and stress relaxation test data to obtain the Prony series terms that represent the viscoelastic behavior and perform analysis. Others have used dynamic mechanical analysis in order to obtain frequency domain master curves that were converted to time domain before obtaining the Prony series terms. In this paper, nonlinear solvers were used on frequency domain master curve results from dynamic mechanical analysis to obtain Prony series terms and perform finite element analysis on the impact of adding viscoelastic properties when performing reliability assessment. The computational study results were used to perform comparative assessment to understand the impact of including viscoelastic behavior in reliability analysis under thermal cycling and drop testing for Wafer Level Chip Scale Packages. 

Contamination due to the use of airside economizer has become a major issue that cost companies revenue. This issue will continue to rise as server components become smaller, densely packed, and as companies move into more polluted environments. Contaminants with small particles less than 10 μm are not noticeable; yet, these particles are most likely to get to areas where they can cause damage. Dust from different sources and suspended in air settles on surfaces of electrical components. The dust mainly contains two components: salts and metallic particles. The salts may be neutral or corrosive and the nature of the salt depends on the deliquescent humidity. For metallic particles, surveys are performed in various data centers in order to determine the limits in terms of weight per unit area and particle size distribution. It is necessary to first identify those contaminants that directly affect the information technology (IT) equipment in the data center. In this research, a real-world data center utilizing airside economization in an ANSI/ISA classified G2 environment was chosen for the study. Servers were removed and qualitative study of cumulative corrosion damage was carried out. The particulate contaminants were collected from different locations of a server and material characterization was performed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The analysis from these results helps to explain the impact of the contaminants on IT equipment reliability.